Misjudged a late evening walk. Walking past a graveyard, located down a very deserted country lane, just as the night roles in. Always a bit spooky.

Somethings are always a bit unnerving.

In the UK, having to contact a company called BT, that’s unnerving. BT is a big telecoms company.

BT aptly can also mean Bloody Terrible…..

BT provide our broadband and telephone service. Both have been broken for 6 days now.

Do you remember when you had to queue when ever you went into a branch in person. Then the Call Centre was introduced and you ended up queuing for that, listening to the endlessly awful piped music and recorded message – ‘your call is important to us’.

Then CONTACT US ONLINE was brought in to stop the hours wasted waiting in person and on the phone. With good old BT you now have to queue online to use their online service.

Initially the wait time was 15 minutes, which in normal time was actually over an hour. The ‘less than a minute’ wait time turned out to be another 20 minutes. Deep joy.

Fast forward 6 days and still no telephone or broadband. Back on to BT again for the 6th day running. This time going old school, having to use my mobile to call them. Apparently to the BT person, we weren’t a customer priority as we were just a reduction in service rather than a service down issue. I was keen to understand if we only get two services from BT, and both are 100% not working, why wasn’t that service down. Service reduction sounds like we are still getting some services….

On the call, I think my tone went from friendly, to cordial, to a little gnarly… But nothing over the top, no raised voices, quite calm really. But it was a bit too much for Hawklad. One of the things he’s always struggled with is conflict. It throws him, he gets anxious, completely on edge. I have to be careful and over the years I’ve got better, much calmer, trying to avoid putting him through those emotions. Very few things brake me out of calm mode these days. My Football Team’s inability to pass to a colleague and the name ‘Nigel Farage’ are the only things recently to bring on the red mist. But I can’t micromanage every situation. When he went to school, one of the things that constantly unsettled him was the daily, frequent conflicts. Teachers raising voices, pupil on pupil stuff. He would frequently struggle to differentiate between real conflict, minor disagreements and play acting. I wonder if it’s because he struggles to read social interactions, pick up on tone, body language, taking some dialogue too literally. It could be that he really doesn’t like seeing anyone suffer or be hurt. But it does make the modern world a difficult place for Hawklad to fully integrate in to. We are still trying to figure that one out.

And yep, still no broadband……

43 thoughts on “Night shift”

  6. Ha. I had a friend that worked for BT YEARS (a decade?) ago. I find that nowadays every company I need to contact wants to “chat” and then it is not even with a real person, it is with their bot and now “AI bot” so you go through this list that they have programmed and none of it is actually what you need help with then after 20 minutes you get a real person and have to go through it all again. I believe there is no such thing as “customer service”. It is as if companies know that one person lost is not going to make a difference and they just don’t care.

    I guess BT is now O2.

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  10. My face faces stuff for sure, but on the inside I’m with Hawklad on a lot of issues of conflict. I’ve been looking at Marshall Rosenberg’s Non Violent Communication for some time and that helps me to check on the reasons, the whys and wherefores.

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  12. Those sorts of communications drive me over the edge too. It would help if they spared us the noise they call music and didn’t trot out the phrase about how important we are. Like Hawklad, confrontation upsets me and I have never been able to stand up for myself. Which is another reason I am so triggered by the situation in the US currently!

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  14. Technology service going down can be torture for any number of reasons. And I’m with you — two services completely down is NOT service reduction.

    Struggling with conflict makes things so hard. The fact that your son doesn’t have to be IN conflict, just around it to be a challenge makes things much more complicated. Sending 💛

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